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American-Centric UI Is Leveling Tech Culture — and Design Diversity

A customer checks Apple's iPhone 5 at a store in Tokyo Friday morning, Sept. 21, 2012. Apple’s Asian fans jammed the tech juggernaut’s shops in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore to pick up the latest version of its iPhone. (AP Photo/Koji Sasahara)

Image: Koji Sasahara/AP

Whenever an app, a website, or a physical product like a gaming console is exported, it ships with a side of cultural influence. Technology in particular is a great leveler of culture, and the more engaging and embedded it becomes, the more pernicious its influence. Even more so than the jeans and movies America ships around the world, our interfaces spread the values of those who designed them – whether intended or not.

>Technology is a great leveler of culture, and the more engaging and embedded it becomes, the more pernicious its influence.

Our iPads, Fuelbands and Xboxes may be made in China, but they’re the products of an emphatically American cultural mindset. Sony’s recent success with the PS4 is framed as an American-led effort, despite being designed in Japan. Even the major electronics innovators of Asia have centered their user experience design efforts in the U.S.: Lenovo has consolidated much of its R&D in North Carolina, and Samsung’s UX Innovation Lab is now in Silicon Valley. The designers and technologists themselves may sometimes hail from around the world, but the interactions they design overwhelmingly reflect a perspective native to modern, affluent, urban America.

That our smartphones can be customized through the installation of apps assumes we want a device that is unique and personal. That our wearable devices track and analyze physical movement – as opposed to, say, proximity to friends or family – assumes that individual activity is the kind most worth monitoring. That our gaming consoles are designed primarily with a single, networked player in mind assumes we prefer remote interaction to the in-person kind; compare that to what Korean and Chinese gamers do, which is cluster in cafes.

This focus on individuality and personal mobility is deeply American, and it's being taught to the rest of the world through the medium of American technology. And the age of invisible design, with its focus on experiences (as opposed to just products and interfaces) has made cultural influence the elephant in the room: obvious, ignored, and hugely powerful. Especially because technology platforms favor the culture that spawned them.

>Wearable devices tracking physical movement – as opposed to proximity to family – assumes that individual activity is the kind most worth monitoring.

If the best experience we can have with technology requires an American-designed platform, we’ll get an American experience: Buy an Apple iPhone, and in a thousand quiet ways, we interact with it the way Cupertino wants us to. The experience is so seamless and fulfilling, that consumers around the world are willing to sacrifice a fraction of cultural identity to obtain it. Multiply this by millions of users, and the effect can be transformative. As cities like Bangalore, Curitiba, and Shenzhen become more affluent and connected, their residents increasingly resemble those in any other tech-savvy city.

This is a loss for all of us. Enjoying a better user experience shouldn’t require acting more American.

Shared platforms create shared cultures. Those shared cultures may enable opportunity, but they also erode the varied perspectives and values that make humans such a diverse bunch. If the future of design is in thinking of “constellations of devices” where individual devices “reduce complexity of the system” and “increase the value of everything else in the ecosystem” (according to Bill Buxton in WIRED), well, it’s important to remember that ecosystems rely not just on interacting components – but on diversity to survive and thrive.

What Designers Will Need to Do Differently
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Remember when new consumer technology frustrated us with two dozen unintelligible switches, a 60-page manual, and dependence on service technicians? (Just think about programming the 1980s VCR.) We put up with it, and we blamed ourselves when we couldn’t figure the thing out.

[#contributor: /contributors/593254b944db296121d6a5ed]|||Sean Madden is Executive Managing Director at [Ziba](http://www.ziba.com/). Specializing in service design and innovation strategy, he leads multi-disciplinary design teams to create products and services for global Fortune 100 companies. Follow him on Twitter @smadden.|||

It took a radical expansion in the design profession to finally fix this problem by bringing user empathy and workflow analysis, alongside engineering and visual styling, into the design. Today, we assume that the cost of entry into this world of improved user experience is cultural leveling. But that sets up a false bargain.

Just as user-centered design transformed technology in the 1990s and early 2000s, cultural fluency needs to transform it today: user experience (UX) design that’s familiar enough with a user’s cultural background to meet him or her halfway.

Cultural fluency demands abandoning the idea that functionality is a universal language, and that “good UX” is culturally agnostic.

Consider the use of gestural interfaces in a world where gestures mean very different things in different cultures. Or using scrolling for timelines when time horizons (among other culturally sensitive dimensions) represent different values to different societies. Even the idea of touching our screens is a culturally sensitive UX action.

It requires tremendous discipline to overcome the cultural biases of American design and engineering, to avoid teams building their own cultural norms into how the systems facilitate human interactions. Cultural fluency will require another expansion in design, one that incorporates anthropological, psychological, and historical insights in addition to everything that’s come before. And it will require understanding the broader impact on culture and society when devices begin making decisions and transacting on their own, as promised by the Internet of Things.

Cultural fluency will take American tech companies not just recognizing, but actively fulfilling, this need. While many companies try to understand the differences between users in different parts of the world, it’s most often used to determine which items to sell and how to market them. Ford made some progress in cultural fluency with its decision to raise the rear seats in Chinese-bound SUVs, but true cultural accommodation is much more fundamental: It means designing interactions from the ground up based on local patterns and expectations – not just modifying the ones that play well in Silicon Valley.

Until now, design advances have been focused on optimizing human-to-machine interactions (obviously, experience design is less necessary at the machine-to-machine level): How do we understand what our devices are doing? How do they understand us?

But human-to-human interaction is left out in the cold – including designing for groups of people. Culturally speaking, this means rethinking the definitions and assumptions of the “group”. For American designers, group often means multiple user profiles in parallel or shared on one account. But as Berg CEO Matt Webb notes, the group "isn’t just multiple people added together... [it] is something more.” This is a very subtle but important difference that plays out strongly across cultures.

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Rethinking design for culture is a tall order. But it’s worth the effort. Beyond altruistic reasons such as preserving diversity, designing for cultural fluency presents a tremendous business opportunity – especially at a time when design is arguably no longer the killer differentiator (because everyone’s doing it) or is at best an incremental one.

>Human-to-human interaction is left out in the cold – including designing for groups of people (and rethinking what 'group' means).

And as the people at the bottom of the pyramid get wealthier, they will expect a seamless UX that doesn’t demand cultural sacrifice. The first companies to do this are going to find themselves with unprecedented growth and a whole new set of brand loyalists. The companies don’t have to be from within the culture that is being designed for, but we should pay more attention to the excellent examples of homegrown UX from other parts of the world.

M-Pesa is an SMS money-transfer system that has transformed banking in Sub-Saharan Africa. Korean and Chinese communication apps like WeChat and Kakao have been embraced throughout Asia and the Middle East. These products are based on very different design assumptions than those behind the “golden age of design” featured in WIRED: That users without data plans might still want to access mobile banking, for example; or that strangers speaking different dialects might want to strike up an image-rich conversation just because they’re in close proximity. These perspectives turn out to be common in much of the world, but see little expression of them in the product design coming out of most American companies.

If designers are building tools to enable seamless experiences, we must concede that they could be experiences we never imagined. And that it's entirely possible to deliver an outstanding user experience using familiar systems and devices, in a way that no American would recognize.

There's also the matter of designers staying true to their core values. Yes, we want to see our products be widely adopted and be commercially successful. But we’re also working in UX design because we want to give people more freedom. We want to get technology “out of the way.” Yet for much of the world, the current trajectory of user experience design means less freedom … not more.